This is the fourth and final part of the Dynamo blog interview with Dr Sergey Zinatulin on the subject of breathing. In the first part of the interview, Dr Zinatulin explained the ways our breathing can affect our health in general, in the second part he described a series of simple tests we can use in order to assess how well we are breathing, while in the third part he discussed matters related to breath training as treatment to diseases, the ways that our diet can affect our breathing. In this fourth installment he discusses the use of breath exercises in managing survival stress and enhancing sports performance.
Dr Zinatulin, I happen to know that over the years you have consulted special units of the police in Russia on the use of breathing exercises to minimize the effects of survival stress. Is it long-term breath training you are advocating to law enforcements officers or specific techniques that should be used when one is under survival stress?
I have a special interest in this subject since my son does his service in a special tactical assault group. I have also been invited to teach a number of seminars to various special units. In general, breathing techniques requiring the use of the Frolov Device that are being used by sportsmen can just as well be used to enhance fitness for special forces soldiers. I also teach basic methods of breathing without the device, which are extremely useful for relieving stress and the replenishing of vital resources while on the field. These techniques have been developed around Buteyko’s core ideas and my personal experience on the subject of breath-training. The main focus in my method is to perform slow diaphragmatic breathing using strict formulas of duration of inhalation, exhalation and holding the breath.
Let’s move ahead to the relationship between breathing and athletic performance. First of all, are the breathing habits and patterns of an athlete necessarily healthy? Does physical training guarantee optimum breathing patterns for health?
Respiratory Illnesses in sportsmen are not rare. According to the available data, the rate of bronchial asthma in athletes is higher than in general population. It is actually assumed that nearly 20% of the athletes participating in the Beijing Olympic Games had symptoms of exercise-induced asthma (EIA).
There is no doubt that physical activity can increase the capacity of the respiratory system. A very interesting example is that of Australian potato farmer Cliff Young who, in 1983, at the age of 61, he won the first Westfield Sydney to Melbourne Ultra Marathon. Young was not a professional athlete but he spent most of his life running in heavy shoes in order to round up his sheep! But in order for one to achieve elite performance, special breath-training can be used to develop the reserve capacities of the respiratory system that can translate to significant improvement, especially in certain types of sports. This includes resistance training of the respiratory muscles both in inhalation and exhalation, increasing the vital capacity of the lungs, and developing resistance to hypoxia. Most often, what athletes do is improve their ability to hyperventilate during intense effort, but they rarely learn how to regulate their breathing in order to restore the body after the effort. In order to balance performance with overall health, athletes need to learn how to breathe optimally in a normal state so that they do not develop hyperventilation syndrome by transferring the breathing patterns they use when they're performing their sport to their everyday life.
What is the difference between training the breath with and without a device? Is there an advantage in using a device?
Training with various equipment and devices is widely accepted in sports circles – athletes lift weights or use exercise machines to increase muscle strength, endurance, coordination and movement speed. For athletes, it has been proven time and again that training with equipment is more effective than using bodyweight exercises exclusively. It is the same with breath-training: training with a device allows us to create more complex and varied training programs at each stage of sportsman physical training (preparing for competition, competition, rehabilitation). With the help of a device we can develop and regulate additional resistance during both inhalation and exhalation, perform breathing trainings in regimes of hypoxia (low CO2) or hypercapnia (high CO2). I personally advocate the use of the Frolov device, since it allows us to manipulate all the above parameters. In addition to that, it offers added benefits such as the vibratory stimulation of the respiratory muscles and bronchi, while it can also be used for performing inhalations with essential oils.
Finally, I often like to point out another two important factors regarding breath-training that are not talked about much: breathing exercises improve adaptation to changes in climate and time zones which is important for sportsmen who compete internationally, plus breathing exercises with a device help athletes recover after injuries and surgeries faster and easier.
Can breath-training enhance athletic performance in measurable ways? For example, is there solid research indicating that training the breath can improve aerobic power or capacity or maximal oxygen uptake (VO2 max)? I know for sure some of this blog’s readers would be most grateful if you could point them to that research.
There are numerous studies about it in the sports medicine literature and this link is just one of those studies: http://www.intellectbreathing.com/files/sport-device_eng.pdf.
Is there currently any particularly promising research conducted on the effects of breath-training on our health? If it depended entirely upon you, which area would you chose to conduct research in?
Nowadays, laboratories always have some research going on around breathing and its potential to affect health. This is closely connected with the need to qualify specialists that work in special conditions (lifeguards, divers, spacemen), and quite important for the development of non-pharmacological treatments and prevention of various diseases and the improvement of the quality of life for the elderly and patients with Parkinson’s, Altzheimer’s and other diseases. Rich Stacel (a natural health practitioner, and practitioner of Chinese martial arts) summed up this situation very successfully when he said that ”...science has only recently begun to open up to the idea that breathing might have more going on with it than the simple exchange of gases with each breath. Scientists are now coming to see that breathing also acts as a metabolic regulator, has immune boosting potential, increases oxygen flow to the brain and a lot more”.
In my opinion, the most exciting part of this research is breathing and brain function. Our breath is a link between body and mind. The brain weighs only 2% from the body mass, but consumes 20% of oxygen coming into the body, and that is exactly why the quality of breathing directly influences the condition and function of the brain. At average, a single man takes 14 breaths per minute, a trained one 8, and one that is meditating only 6. This type of breathing is considered by scientists as deep and efficient. American scientist R. Wallis has found out that during meditation the body starts to work more efficiently, consuming 16% less oxygen, only 8% less than during sleep! Breathing exercises improve not only our emotional state, but the intellect, attention, long-term and short-term memory as well. If we think about it, these benefits are of the utmost importance for our civilization, because the progress is dependent upon the products of our intellect. Prevention of stress-related and psychosomatic diseases is also highly important. My professional experience shows that breath-training improves patients’ state even in the most severe of cases like head injury after-effects, multiple sclerosis, depression, and stroke. From a social point of view, an important field of the breathing-related research should be obstetrics, because the health of a baby – the future of our society, that is - fully depends on the quality of the mother’s breathing. I sincerely hope that medical science will soon begin extensive research on this remarkable resource and we will get to witness the health revolution of humanity!
For more information on Dr Zinatulin's work and the Frolov Respiration Training Device, please visit:
www.intellectbreathing.com
www.vitaltkoncept.se
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| Dr Sergey Zinatulin teaching the use of the Frolov Device to members of a special police unit in Novosibirsk |
Dr Zinatulin, I happen to know that over the years you have consulted special units of the police in Russia on the use of breathing exercises to minimize the effects of survival stress. Is it long-term breath training you are advocating to law enforcements officers or specific techniques that should be used when one is under survival stress?
I have a special interest in this subject since my son does his service in a special tactical assault group. I have also been invited to teach a number of seminars to various special units. In general, breathing techniques requiring the use of the Frolov Device that are being used by sportsmen can just as well be used to enhance fitness for special forces soldiers. I also teach basic methods of breathing without the device, which are extremely useful for relieving stress and the replenishing of vital resources while on the field. These techniques have been developed around Buteyko’s core ideas and my personal experience on the subject of breath-training. The main focus in my method is to perform slow diaphragmatic breathing using strict formulas of duration of inhalation, exhalation and holding the breath.
Let’s move ahead to the relationship between breathing and athletic performance. First of all, are the breathing habits and patterns of an athlete necessarily healthy? Does physical training guarantee optimum breathing patterns for health?
Respiratory Illnesses in sportsmen are not rare. According to the available data, the rate of bronchial asthma in athletes is higher than in general population. It is actually assumed that nearly 20% of the athletes participating in the Beijing Olympic Games had symptoms of exercise-induced asthma (EIA).
There is no doubt that physical activity can increase the capacity of the respiratory system. A very interesting example is that of Australian potato farmer Cliff Young who, in 1983, at the age of 61, he won the first Westfield Sydney to Melbourne Ultra Marathon. Young was not a professional athlete but he spent most of his life running in heavy shoes in order to round up his sheep! But in order for one to achieve elite performance, special breath-training can be used to develop the reserve capacities of the respiratory system that can translate to significant improvement, especially in certain types of sports. This includes resistance training of the respiratory muscles both in inhalation and exhalation, increasing the vital capacity of the lungs, and developing resistance to hypoxia. Most often, what athletes do is improve their ability to hyperventilate during intense effort, but they rarely learn how to regulate their breathing in order to restore the body after the effort. In order to balance performance with overall health, athletes need to learn how to breathe optimally in a normal state so that they do not develop hyperventilation syndrome by transferring the breathing patterns they use when they're performing their sport to their everyday life.
What is the difference between training the breath with and without a device? Is there an advantage in using a device?
Training with various equipment and devices is widely accepted in sports circles – athletes lift weights or use exercise machines to increase muscle strength, endurance, coordination and movement speed. For athletes, it has been proven time and again that training with equipment is more effective than using bodyweight exercises exclusively. It is the same with breath-training: training with a device allows us to create more complex and varied training programs at each stage of sportsman physical training (preparing for competition, competition, rehabilitation). With the help of a device we can develop and regulate additional resistance during both inhalation and exhalation, perform breathing trainings in regimes of hypoxia (low CO2) or hypercapnia (high CO2). I personally advocate the use of the Frolov device, since it allows us to manipulate all the above parameters. In addition to that, it offers added benefits such as the vibratory stimulation of the respiratory muscles and bronchi, while it can also be used for performing inhalations with essential oils.
Finally, I often like to point out another two important factors regarding breath-training that are not talked about much: breathing exercises improve adaptation to changes in climate and time zones which is important for sportsmen who compete internationally, plus breathing exercises with a device help athletes recover after injuries and surgeries faster and easier.
Can breath-training enhance athletic performance in measurable ways? For example, is there solid research indicating that training the breath can improve aerobic power or capacity or maximal oxygen uptake (VO2 max)? I know for sure some of this blog’s readers would be most grateful if you could point them to that research.
There are numerous studies about it in the sports medicine literature and this link is just one of those studies: http://www.intellectbreathing.com/files/sport-device_eng.pdf.
Is there currently any particularly promising research conducted on the effects of breath-training on our health? If it depended entirely upon you, which area would you chose to conduct research in?
Nowadays, laboratories always have some research going on around breathing and its potential to affect health. This is closely connected with the need to qualify specialists that work in special conditions (lifeguards, divers, spacemen), and quite important for the development of non-pharmacological treatments and prevention of various diseases and the improvement of the quality of life for the elderly and patients with Parkinson’s, Altzheimer’s and other diseases. Rich Stacel (a natural health practitioner, and practitioner of Chinese martial arts) summed up this situation very successfully when he said that ”...science has only recently begun to open up to the idea that breathing might have more going on with it than the simple exchange of gases with each breath. Scientists are now coming to see that breathing also acts as a metabolic regulator, has immune boosting potential, increases oxygen flow to the brain and a lot more”.
In my opinion, the most exciting part of this research is breathing and brain function. Our breath is a link between body and mind. The brain weighs only 2% from the body mass, but consumes 20% of oxygen coming into the body, and that is exactly why the quality of breathing directly influences the condition and function of the brain. At average, a single man takes 14 breaths per minute, a trained one 8, and one that is meditating only 6. This type of breathing is considered by scientists as deep and efficient. American scientist R. Wallis has found out that during meditation the body starts to work more efficiently, consuming 16% less oxygen, only 8% less than during sleep! Breathing exercises improve not only our emotional state, but the intellect, attention, long-term and short-term memory as well. If we think about it, these benefits are of the utmost importance for our civilization, because the progress is dependent upon the products of our intellect. Prevention of stress-related and psychosomatic diseases is also highly important. My professional experience shows that breath-training improves patients’ state even in the most severe of cases like head injury after-effects, multiple sclerosis, depression, and stroke. From a social point of view, an important field of the breathing-related research should be obstetrics, because the health of a baby – the future of our society, that is - fully depends on the quality of the mother’s breathing. I sincerely hope that medical science will soon begin extensive research on this remarkable resource and we will get to witness the health revolution of humanity!
This fourth installment concluded the Dynamo blog interview with Dr Sergey Zinatulin. I would like to thank him for offering valuable insight into this subject which is often the source of misunderstanding in martial arts circles. I would also like to thank Anna Chistyakova for translating back and forth between myself and the good doctor, as well as my student Charles Franz, Thong Guyen, Pete Jensen and Joao Furia for sending over their questions.
For more information on Dr Zinatulin's work and the Frolov Respiration Training Device, please visit:
www.intellectbreathing.com
www.vitaltkoncept.se
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